Effects – Grain and Post-Crop Vignetting Presets

Today I have some Effects presets to share including Post-Crop Vignettes and Grain.

I have found that having a preset for each of the Post-Crop Vignetting Styles allows me to quickly preview (using the Navigator panel in the Develop Module) the style that will work best with my selected image. Since I typically darken down the edges, almost all of my presets have a negative Amount.

There are presets for the Color Priority (CP), Highlight Priority (HP) and Paint Overlay (PO) Style. I find that they Color Priority is more subtle than the Highlight Priority but unfortunately can not recover highlights in an image. Highlight Priority is more blatant and may have color shifts in the darker values, but has the advantage of recovering highlights. Both of these styles (CP and HP) work more like a shift in exposure in comparison to the Paint Overlay (PO) style (which is similar to an overlay of black or white paint).

I have also included a Color Priority preset with the Highlights slider set to 100 to reintroduces contrast in the highlights. This will be most noticeable if the vignetting is applied over bright areas such as highlights in a sky. There is a preset to add a hard black or white edge as well. And although my presets darken the edges, you can always set the Amount slider to a positive value to lighten the edge.

I have also included a few presets for adding Grain. It is important to note, you will need to do some testing in order to see how the grain that you add will look on your final output. As you can imagine the amount, size and Roughness of the grain will appear differently depending on the size of the original file and how you choose to export it (as it will most likely need to be sampled up or down in the process).

To install, download and unzip the JKost Grain Enhancement and JKost Post-Crop Vignetting file. Launch Lightroom and choose Lightroom > Preferences (Mac) or Edit > Preferences (Win). At the top of the dialog, click “Presets” and click the Show Lightroom Presets Folders button. Copy the “JKost Gain Enhancement” and “JKost Post Crop Vignetting” folders into the “Develop Presets” folder. They will appear in the Presets panel in the Develop Module in Lightroom.